


audentes fortuna iuvat

by wichahpi



Series: Elate Week 2016 [2]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Gen, in case you were wondering i'm actually a cheese factory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 07:44:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8319610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wichahpi/pseuds/wichahpi
Summary: In which Cassie Drake has ants in her pants.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Elate Week: **October 18th {Day Two}** \- Adventure || Luck; _fortune favours the bold_

"Please, sweetheart. Could you stop kicking the armrest for me?"

Cassie Drake frowns but stops kicking her feet at the chair across from her, turns to press one cheek into her mother's thigh with a moody huff. The terrible twos seemed to be in full swing, and even Elena's successful attempt to tickle some giggles out of her daughter had ended with another pout and restless shifting as Cassie refused to cheer up.

Elena loves being a mother, she loves her work, and she loves that both of her realities can mesh together so seamlessly. She really, truly does. She loves that her daughter gets to see the world, and that she and her husband have the chance to do something that they truly love. It’s the best of both worlds, and more she ever could’ve imagined during those early, fledgling stages of their relationship.

She doesn’t, however, particularly enjoy traveling alone with a toddler. Their toddler, specifically. Sure, Cassie is theoretically a fifty-fifty split of her and Nate but heaven help her, she is entirely Nate’s child when she is bored. And being stuck in an airport with _Nathan Drake’s_ baby has just rocketed to the top of her “not even one more time” list, right in front of “grenades” and “fighting supernatural monsters”, even surpassing her least favorite of them all, which consists of just Nate's scribbled approximation of their saddest faces when they'd been _apart_

Cassie wasn’t interested in any of the dozen items Elena had packed in her tiny green backpack. Not coloring or finger puppets or any of the various colorful activities that all of the reviews had _promised_ to keep any restless kid occupied and entertained for hours. Instead, she’d been terrorizing the complimentary lounge they’d been camped out in, and only by some small miracle hadn't managed to get them kicked out after she’d spilled an entire tray of fancy cheese on herself and cried because the crumbly squares didn't taste as delicious as she'd been expecting.

“What a load of crap.” She mutters to herself, gently kicking the little backpack that sits between her legs. Serves her right to act against her gut instinct and let Nate talk her out of bribing Cassie with her work tablet, which was currently drained of battery from relentlessly checking the status of their flight. She watches Cassie wiggle off the chairs she'd been lying between to look perplexedly around the room for probably the hundredth time in the last hour. 

“Where daddy? Where daddy at? _Want_ daddy.” Cassie whimpers, crossing her arms and giving Elena a pouty look she's entirely comfortable blaming on the Drake side of the gene pool.

“Me too, kiddo. Me too.” Elena sighs. They’ve traveled without Nate before, but at one week and three days, this is also the longest they’ve been apart since before Cassie’s birth. But it’s entirely his fault, really. He’d decided to leave ahead of their planned departure so he could meet up with Sam and Sully – and bail them out of the latest mess they’d found themselves in. Elena had stayed behind in the States to finish up the last of their packing before the big move and meet with their producers in Maryland. It had been going well, until Cassie caught a glimpse of an episode in an airport lounge and wouldn’t be appeased until she saw her father in person.

“How about some juice?” Elena tries, offering up her sippy cup with an enticing shake. "Do you want your Dora cup?"

“No, _daddy_.” The toddler insists, with the stomp of her foot. Her sneaker lights up with a passive-aggressive rainbow of color, and Elena sighs as she checks her phone for what must be the millionth time, even though she already knows Nate hasn’t responded to any of her texts. It’s not unusual, with his dinosaur of a phone being constantly set to silent and his penchant for getting really, really distracted when Sam and Sully started regaling him with tales of their most recent adventures. 

But still – it would be nice to know if he’d seen any of the dozen messages she’d sent begging him to video call when he got the chance.

 _She can do this_. She takes a calming, fortifying breath and pulls her daughter too her, wrapping her up in a big hug before pulling back to look her in the eye. “Cassie, I know you’re upset right now and want daddy, and I miss him too. We have just _one_ more plane ride and we’ll see him, okay?”

Cassie stops with the loud whining, but keeps pouting and Elena will take what she can get.

“Come on,” She wiggles her fingers encouraging Cassie to take them. “Let’s go to our gate so we can be first on the plane to go see daddy.”

Her daughter doesn’t need any more prompting, little fingers curling into hers and already attempting to drag her away from her seat. "Mama, go see daddy."

“Hold on, hold on!” She laughs. Cassie gives her an impatient look as she slings her travel bag over her shoulders and puts her wrist through the straps of Cassie’s. “Okay, let’s get a move on.”

The ten minute walk to their gate turned into half an hour, as Cassie had to stomp on every brightly colored tile and stare at every piece of ornamental ceiling installations long enough to impress any art historian. She checks the Departures board as they pass, and with a sinking gut she realizes their flight to Reykjavik has been delayed by _yet another_ hour. She pulls Cassie along and collapses onto the nearest bench, busies herself with retying her hair in a ponytail and promises herself that she will not cry. She can do this. She’s been in way tougher situations than wrangling an ornery toddler through an international airport by herself. If any of those situations seem like cake walk in retrospection now, well, she’s not admitting it to anyone but herself.

For a second, she lets herself think about how crazy this all is. Iceland. They’re going to _Iceland_. She’s taking her two year old to Iceland with her to film their family’s historical adventure television show because that is her life. Her daughter’s already made a decent sized dent in her second passport, and she herself is quickly running out of real estate in her own and she loves every minute of it. 

Of course, she loves it even more when her entire family is together and the plane she’s supposed to be flying on isn’t apparently experiencing ten kinds of mechanical failure, but in the long run, it’s just small stuff. Whenever she feels wholly unequipped to juggle every aspect of her crazy life, she just looks at her daughter, her husband, the family they’d carved out for themselves and how _happy_ they truly are, after everything they'd been through.

It’s with that thought that she finds her mood lifting that little bit, and she turns to look over at Cassie, who has her tiny face pressed against the glass half-wall that allows them to look down from their level onto the floor below. 

“Mama!” Cassie shrieks, and Elena's head snaps immediately to her, worried something is wrong. But Cassie just points excitedly behind them and Elena twists around to investigate, follows Cassie’s line of sight to see the steady stream of people going up and down the escalators “Look! Look!”

Of course her daughter, who had her diaper changed in the Taj Mahal when she was three weeks old, saw Machu Picchu from a hiking backpack before she could even walk, and regularly played in ancient ruins like they were her own personal backyard playground, was completely enthralled by an _escalator_. 

“Wave?” She asks, nearly vibrating with enthusiasm. “I wave?”

They all seem to be preoccupied, either talking to their companions, staring at their phones or books or just generally disinterested and exhausted, and Elena can’t see the harm if it makes Cassie happy. “Sure. Go for it. Wave your little heart out.”

Cassie lets out a burst of giggles in response, then stands on the tips of her toes to frantically start waving her arms at other travelers. No one notices at first, and she lets out a frustrated whine. But then an older woman catches sight of her, can't help but smile at her enthusiasm and returns her wave with a dramatic swoop of her arm.

“Wave!” Cassie yelps with a grin, flapping her arms frenetically. “Wave back!”

Elena can’t help but smile as the woman nudges her companion, a teenage boy who halfheartedly wiggles his fingers at her as well. 

“Hi! Hi!” Cassie jumps up and down. “I see you! Hi!”

Her voice catches the attention of more people, who all seem to lack any immunity to her exuberant charm. Groups of people start indulging her and soon she has the entire escalator waving, people waving as they walk by, even gets a high five from a pilot as he makes his way past.

Elena’s never been so glad to have a decent camera on hand, records the whole thing and vows to hold onto these moments, as tiring as they may sometimes be. 

After half an hour of incessant waving and shrieking and happy laughter, Cassie retires to the bench and curls onto her lap, and Elena isn't surprised when her eyes slowly close and her breathing turns slow and deep. She’s content to sit, stroking Cassie’s baby fine hair and rolls her eyes as her phone indicates that she finally has an incoming call from Nate.

And Elena doesn’t even care that they’ve apparently been moved to a redeye and her butt’s already gone numb, because she feels like the luckiest person in the world.


End file.
